If a
family member, loved one, or friend were to express or otherwise display his/her
suffering to you, you surely wouldn't run off to gossip about it with strangers.
You wouldn't make snide remarks about a loved one's sudden and drastic loss of
weight behind his or her back, would you? You wouldn't crack cruel jokes about a
friend or even a casual acquaintance's substance addiction, right? If a family
member was in an abusive or enabling relationship, the last thing on your mind
would be to seek out as much evidence of that relationship and keep it in a
scrapbook, correct?

You
would want to help these people. That's basic, human empathy.

Somehow,
though, when it comes to celebrities, we have the ability to turn off that
instinct toward empathy. We'll gossip about this or that famous person's
problems. We'll judge this singer or that actress for her personal appearance,
especially if she looks "too thin" or "put on some pounds."
We'll laugh at somebody's joke about how that celebrity drank to excess and
passed out somewhere or got high and caused some kind of scene.

What is
it about celebrities that can turn us into unapologetic jerks? Why is it such a
common reaction to judge and mock a famous person's troubles? Why is empathy
toward our fellow human beings, which is the norm in everyday situations, so
easy to dismiss if that fellow human being happens to have his or her face and
name plastered across the tabloids? Amy,
a devastatingly intimate documentary about the difficult life and tragic death
of singer Amy Winehouse, doesn't have the answers, but it certainly will make
one think twice before laughing or gossiping or condemning the next time one
reads or hears about some celebrity's most recent "exploit."

Asif
Kapadia's film opens with home video of a teenage Winehouse singing "Happy
Birthday" to a friend. We can hear something special: the vibrato, the
range, and the rawness, as if every note is improvised from some subconscious
part of her mind that simply knows where to go without thinking about it. She
was raised with the masters of jazz song-stylings while everyone else was
listening to the Top 40 hits. Growing up, she never really wanted a career in
music. She says she was just happy knowing that she could sing if she ever
needed to.

The
entire film is made up of such footage, in which we can observe firsthand how
her skills become more refined as her body wastes away from drugs and alcohol,
and it's narrated by family, friends, and professional partners. Almost all of
them say the same things: Winehouse, who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at
the too-young age of 27, was humble and honest and incredibly talented and
neither seeking nor cut out for fame.

She
knew it would destroy her. She says as much multiple times over the course of
the film, usually as a joke during an interview, as her career starts to rise.
Winehouse imagined herself singing in little jazz clubs throughout her native
England and, more importantly, was convinced she would be happy with that life.

Two
things happen to stop that dream: She meets/falls hard for a guy and becomes
famous. The guy is Blake Fielder, a rock club owner, who would later become
Winehouse's husband. According to friends, she started using cocaine and heroin
because he did. She would have done anything for him. She says so in a voice
mail to him after one of their fallings out, and she sings about it in a couple
of songs. Winehouse's lyrics, which are presented as titles during the many live
and studio-based performances in the film, aren't difficult to decipher. She
lays it all out for the world to hear.

The
song that made her a star is "Rehab," another highly personal ditty
about a real-life incident in which her manager Nicky Shymansky, along with her
friends Juliette and Lauren, attempted to get her help for her struggles with
alcoholism and bulimia. Her father Mitch intervened before anything could be
done, saying she was "fine."

Fielder,
Winehouse's father, and her replacement manager Raye Cosbert, who had the
mentality of a promoter, all get their say in various interviews. It's more
generous than objective on Kapadia's part. Everything these three say
contradicts what we hear from everyone else and see for ourselves. Winehouse was
not "fine" by any standard. If we take her father's reality TV stint
and Fielder's tendency to show up at opportune times while leaving when things
get tough, we can pretty much figure out why they did what they did.

The
film's structure is entirely chronological. We learn what fueled her music—her
parents' separation at a young age, the emotional toll of that, and, most
telling, a battle with depression that lasted for at least half of her life. We
don't come to see Winehouse as the tragic player in a clichéd story about a
rise to/fall from fame. We see her in in a far more personal way—sleeping in
the back of a car on the way to perform at the first stop on the tour for the
release of her debut album, using a silly accent to give her friend a tour of
her hotel room, gasping with wide eyes as Tony Bennett comes on stage to
announce that she has won an award. After that last moment, one of Winehouse's
friends says that the singer took her aside to bemoan, "It's all so boring
without drugs."

That
became Winehouse's story in the media, from the tabloids, which sickeningly
wanted every last detail documented with pictures, to the more mainstream
outlets, which took easy shots at her. One such incident is striking. While on a
world tour that she didn't want to participate in, Winehouse comes out on stage
and doesn't perform. The audience and media assume it's because she was drunk or
stoned and had forgotten what she was doing.

We see
a different side, though—a close-up of her sitting on stage with a devilish
smirk on her face. In context, it appears to be a conscious protest against
everyone who forced her into this situation. In a way, Amy
gives Winehouse a final act of defiance—to force us to see her for who she
was, instead of what everyone wanted her to be.